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Daily Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 5

August 5, 2002

The original plan today was to work on taking the N area down in steps, essentially pit by pit, and simultaneously put my best worker on the human skeleton in the NW corner of the trench. This got changed a little for several reasons. The place I first put my best worker, a large but poorly demarcated ash pit, turned out to be larger and deeper than I originally expected and he was stuck working in it the entire day. Secondly, when I put another worker on excavating the area in the baulk cut over where we expect the rest of the skeleton to be, well, basically he found stuff and it slowed him down. The problem there is that a portion of the area is part of the same 2nd/3rd millennium pit as L5085, which means that it will likely be full of good stuff, in this case a few nice and large sherds and the lower jaw of a fair sized biped, maybe a donkey or a pig or something similar. The other issue in the area is that the space between that pit and the remains of ash pit L5057 in the extreme far NNW contains either some architecture or a lot of mudbrick collapse, similar to what we encountered in the collapse loci related to the Ubaid surfaces in the S and I would like to understand these relations a bit before I have my workers blast down the 10-20 cm that likely are above the actual burial.

The last issue is that I talked to the human bone specialists today and it looks like they may have time to take on this burial before they go, but won’t be sure for a couple days. This changes the timeline a little in that we only need to lightly uncover the skeleton over the next day or two rather than work on articulating it. I would greatly prefer to have the specialists work on the skeleton as it has potential to be very significant and looks to be in a rather difficult orientation. Thus as it stands I’m going to be working under the assumption that they will have the time to come and do the majority of the work on the skeleton. If worse comes to worse and they’re not able to work on it I’ll at least have been able to give myself a little extra to understand the context of the skeleton before I cart it away.

The other thing I did today was look into the S wall of the mudbrick structure, L5104 again. Once again I proved to myself that it is definitely extant and further I even found grain concentrations up against it which further ties the structure to the Ubaid contexts. I cut one section in the E where the hard surface abuts it to check for a continuation of the surface or, excepting that a significant foundation trench between the two. I found neither so it appears, once more, the two are contemporary. Further to the W, I was cutting a similar section when I uncovered the grain concentration. There is still a little confusion towards the W part of the wall as against the S-N wall there may be a break in the wall (near the grain), possibly a doorway or possibly just some severe root turbation has erased the mudbrick as several large roots were uncovered. The other issue it looks as though there might be a slight trace of a later phase of the wall as the top course is slightly off-orientation with the rest of the wall and either it, or possibly its melt, covered a little of the grain feature.

Descriptive Attribute Value(s)
Date 2002-08-05
Year 2002
Has note The purpose of the daily journal was to record the activities taking place in a trench each day. This included which loci were excavated, how and why loci were excavated and the ongoing impressions of the relationships among loci. It should be noted that journals record the actions, impressions and ideas of trench supervisors during the excavations. They are not, therefore, the final interpretations or syntheses of the emerging data.
Dayplan-D-5-2002-08-05-A
Suggested Citation

Andrew Ugan, Eleanor Moseman, Greer Rabicca. (2012) "D-5-2002-08-05 from Asia/Turkey/Kenan Tepe/Area D/Trench 5/Locus 5080". In Kenan Tepe. Bradley Parker, Peter Cobb (Ed). Released: 2012-03-28. Open Context. <https://opencontext.org/documents/6d3539c4-3861-4c8d-c48b-a9820278433f> ARK (Archive): https://n2t.net/ark:/28722/k2028tw2w

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